New Books in Historical Fiction

When Samuel Fiddes and Hailey MacIntyre meet by chance in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1878, their worlds appear to be far distant from each other. Samuel lives with his little sister, Alison, in a tenement—the two of them scrabbling to keep themselves fed and clothed. Hailey enjoys a comfortable middle-class life, although the expectations placed on her as a young woman restrict her future not simply to marriage and motherhood but to a union with the “right” man, defined in terms of wealth and prestige.

Despite this social gap, Samuel and Hailey form an instant bond after he rescues her younger brother from a near-fatal run-in with a careless carriage driver. Both know that Hailey’s parents disapprove of their friendship, never mind a budding romance, but a mix of attraction and teenage rebellion draws them together.

Then fate intervenes. Financial disaster strikes the MacIntyre family just as things start to look up for Samuel and Alison. Hailey’s father decides to move his family to Washington Territory, where he plans to oversee a coal mine. A few months later, Samuel sets off with Alison to follow them. But the Seattle of 1880 is nothing like what any of them expect. It will take a lot of time and effort, it turns out, for Samuel and Hailey to find each other in their wild and heavenly place.

Robin Oliveira is the New York Times bestselling author of three previous works of historical fiction. A Wild and Heavenly Place (Putnam, 2024) is her latest novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book—The Merchant’s Tale, cowritten with P.K. Adams—appeared in November 2023.

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What if HIV started spreading in the early 1500s rather than the late 1900s? Without modern medicine, anybody who catches HIV is going to die. In Wages of Sin (Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2024), by Dr. Harry Turtledove, a patriarchal society reacts to this devastating disease in the only way it knows how: it sequesters women as much as possible, limiting contacts between the sexes except for married couples. While imperfect, such drastic actions do limit the spread of the disease.

The ‘Wasting’ (HIV) has caused devastating destruction throughout the known world and severely limited the development of technology as well, creating a mid-nineteenth century England and London almost unrecognisable to us. This is the world Viola is born into. Extremely intelligent and growing up in a house full of medical books which she reads, she dreams of travelling to far-off places, something she can only do via books since her actions and movements are severely restricted by both law and custom.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kate Quinn and Janie Chang are independently acclaimed authors of historical fiction, both of whom have previously appeared on this podcast channel. Here they combine their skills to tell a story about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake from multiple points of view. One line follows the story of Alice Eastwood, a botanist whom we meet in London five years after the tragedy. Her perspective is contrasted with that of Gemma Garland, an aspiring opera star whose unique voice can’t quite compensate for the migraines that sideline her just as she’s about to make her mark on the world. The third narrator is a young Chinese-American named Feng Suling (“Susie” to the rich white customers who can’t be bothered to learn her name), with a gift for embroidery and a grand ambition: to escape the arranged marriage her uncle plans for her and reunite with Reggie, the love she has lost.

How these three stories intersect and overlap, united by the Phoenix Crown and the man who owns it, I’ll leave for readers to discover. Each chapter is marked by its proximity to the forthcoming earthquake (unknown to the protagonists, of course), but even without that impending threat, the story will draw you in and keep you hooked.

Kate Quinn is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of numerous previous works of historical fiction, ranging from ancient Rome to the 1950s. The Phoenix Crown is her latest novel.

Janie Chang is the award-winning and bestselling author of four previous historical novels, including The Library of Legends and The Porcelain Moon. The Phoenix Crown is her most recent book.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book—The Merchant’s Tale, cowritten with P.K. Adams—appeared in November 2023.

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Josie Belle Gore is only six years old when we meet her in 1908, yet her father has tied a rope around her waist and is lowering her into a dark well to retrieve a dead animal that is poisoning the water. The third daughter of a growing family, Josie has moved with her family from western Texas to Arizona, then eastward again, settling in the New Mexican desert region known as the Jornada del Muerto. Her father, a railroad engineer, spends much of his time away, and it is her mother who holds the family together through poverty, sickness, and drought.

From an early age, Josie learns that her lot in life is to subsume her own interests to those of her family. Although she yearns to become a teacher, even mastering basic literacy is a challenge in a region where schools are few and far between, household chores never-ending, and such basic needs as food and water not always met. As her father falls prey to alcoholism, loses one job after another, and repeatedly uproots the family in search of a better future, Josie clings to the principles her mother has inculcated in her—until one day, she realizes that the price for tolerating that life has risen too high.

Based on the life of the author’s grandmother, Josie’s story sounds grim, but the telling of it is not. Hauntingly beautiful in its evocation of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, this novel will draw you in, even as it gives you a whole new appreciation of the hardships that many of our ancestors endured.

Teresa H. Janssen, a former language and social studies teacher, writes, hikes, tends a small orchard, and is involved in several educational initiatives. The Ways of Water (She Writes Press, 2023) is her debut novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book—The Merchant’s Tale, co-written with P.K. Adams—appeared in November 2023.

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Barely able to walk and rendered mute by the cancer metastasizing in his throat, Ulysses S. Grant is scratching out words, hour after hour, day after day. Desperate to complete his memoirs before his death so his family might have some financial security and he some redemption, Grant journeys back in time.

He had once been the savior of the Union, the general to whom Lee surrendered at Appomattox, a twice-elected president who fought for the civil rights of Black Americans and against the rising Ku Klux Klan, a plain farmer-turned-business magnate who lost everything to a Wall Street swindler, a devoted husband to his wife Julia, and a loving father to four children. In this gorgeously rendered and moving novel, Grant rises from the page in all of his contradictions and foibles, his failures and triumphs.

Moving from blood-stained battlefields to Gilded Age New York, The General and Julia (Atria Books, 2023)explores how Grant's own views on race and Reconstruction changed over time. "A graceful, moving narrative" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) from historical fiction master Jon Clinch, this evocatively crafted novel breathes fresh life into an American icon.

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I’ve interviewed Andrea Penrose before about her mysteries set in the Regency period—most notably, her ongoing series starring the Earl of Wrexford and Lady Charlotte Sloane. In this latest novel, she takes a break from dead bodies and the complicated plots associated with them to tackle a real-life question: how did a supposedly sheltered nineteenth-century aristocrat defy all of society’s expectations that she marry to suit her family and instead craft a life that suited herself?

The titular Diamond of this fictional biography is Lady Hester Stanhope, tagged even today with adjectives such as “notorious” and “eccentric.” After her politically radical and mentally unstable father threatens her with a knife, Lady Hester flees her country estate for London. There—with the help of the noted dandy Beau Brummell during a previous visit—she has already acquired a reputation as outspoken, passionate, and “different.” At twenty-four, she is also regarded as almost too old to wed, but her ties to the politically powerful Pitt family, which boasts two prime ministers among its ranks, mean that she is still a “catch” for men of ambition.

Lady Hester wants none of it. She’d rather dress in men’s clothes and sneak out to prize fights with her cousin Camelford, known to society as the “Half-Mad Lord,” or ride hell-for-leather across the moors. And so the stage is set for what will become, over the course of the book, a spectacular and wholly unconventional life.

Penrose’s decision to focus on Lady Hester’s time in England, rather than her later and better-known sojourn abroad, makes sense in dramatic terms because that’s where the character change happens. And the author does a wonderful job of balancing the demands of history against the requirements for a good novel. Lady Hester is herself a diamond: brilliant and multifaceted, but also cutting and razor-sharp. Although not always likable, she is unforgettable—just as she must have been in real life. I rooted for her all the way, even when I wanted to shake her and say, “Are you nuts? Why would you do that?!”

Andrea Penrose is the bestselling author of Regency-era historical fiction, including the acclaimed Wrexford & Sloane mystery series. The Diamond of London (Kensington Books, 2024) is her latest novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book—The Merchant’s Tale, co-written with P.K. Adams—appeared in November 2023.

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Today I talked to Katherine Vaz about her new novel Above the Salt (Flatiron Books, 2023).

In 1843-1846, on the Portuguese island of Madeira, five-year-old John Alves lived in jail and starved alongside his heretic mother, who was condemned to death for converting to Protestantism from Catholicism. Finally freed, John befriends young Mary Freitas, the adopted daughter of a wonderful botanist. Both families are forced to flee, and they end up in southern Illinois. John teaches signing to deaf children and Mary works as a gardener for a wealthy man who falls in love with her. She’s torn after she and John find each other again, but he’s off to fight in the Civil War. A mean-spirited trick keeps them away from each other and Mary accepts her boss’s marriage proposal. This is a rich and detailed love story based on the Portuguese community of Jacksonville, Illinois, historical characters, events, and flower cultivation, a courtship that took place in the home of rising politician Abraham Lincoln, and a sweeping view of 19th and early 20th century America.

Katherine Vaz is an award-winning author, a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University (2003-09), and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute (2006-7). Her novels include SAUDADE, (St. Martin’s Press), was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and Marlee Matlin (Solo One Productions) optioned it. Her novel MARIANA has been printed in six languages and is currently optioned by Anne Harrison, with screenwriter Sandy Welch. Rizzoli Publishers picked it as one of their top three books of 1998, and the U.S. Library of Congress chose it as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998. Her collection FADO & OTHER STORIES won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and two of the stories won her a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. OUR LADY OF THE ARTICHOKES won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and the title story was the springboard for a one-page film idea that was one of eight national winners in the 2014 “Write Start” contest co-sponsored by the New York Film Academy. Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines, including the Harvard Review, BOMB, Tin House, Glimmer Train, etc., and her children’s stories have been included in anthologies by Simon & Schuster, Viking, and Penguin. She was a fiction editor for the Harvard Review and has lectured extensively on magical realism.

Katherine Vaz is the first Portuguese American to have her work recorded for the archives of the Library of Congress, Hispanic Division, and she was on the six-person U.S. Presidential Delegation to open the American Pavilion at the World’s Fair/Expo 98 in Lisbon. She teaches the “Writing the Luso Experience” workshop in the Disquiet International Literary program in Lisbon. A California native, she lives in New York City with her husband, Christopher Cerf, who hails from a publishing family (his father co-founded Random House) and has played creative and executive roles in children’s television, most notably Sesame Street and Between the Lions.

G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com).

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Annie Fisk—an only child in Los Alamos, New Mexico—spends a lot of time investigating the treasure trove of objects at the back of her garden. Her father, with whom she is close, works long hours on the nuclear bomb project, her mother seems distant and preoccupied, and Annie has trouble making friends. But she is a gifted student, and she leaves home to major in physics and astronomy at a Texas college. At around the same time, she becomes romantically involved with Evelyn, an artist.

Yet Annie’s sights are set on the stars—more specifically, NASA, where the Apollo Project is underway. She graduates in 1962 and, against Evelyn’s objections, heads for Houston, where she lands a job as a secretary—it’s the 1960s, after all, and that’s what women are expected to do. There she meets Norman Gale, a relationship that opens up her future both professionally and personally.

But it’s Annie’s past, more than her present, that holds her back. And in this beautifully written debut novel, Isa Arsén ties all the disparate threads together in a unique and surprising way.

Isa Arsén lives in South Texas with her husband and a comically small dog. When not writing, she is an audio engineer for interactive media. Shoot the Moon ((G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2023), 2023) is her debut novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Storyteller, appeared in January 2023.

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Angus McDonald had to escape from Scotland or risk arrest. In 1838, he contracted with the Hudson Bay Company to trade in the Pacific Northwest. There he discovers majestic mountains, raging rivers, and buffalo. He meets and marries Catherine, who is related to Nez Perce royalty, and together they face competing claims of British fur traders and gold seekers, settlers and Native Americans who’ve lives for thousands of years in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. The real Angus McDonald left essays and articles, and newspaper clippings and official letters that describe his friendships, horses, passion for his wife, his trajectory as a trader and interpreter, and the rise and fall of the people he’s come to love. The Shining Mountains (High Road Books, 2023) is a brilliant, fictional exploration of a family’s clash between colonial expansion and native culture, based on the author’s blended Scottish and Nez Pierce ancestors.

Alix Christie, a direct descendant of Angus McDonald’s brother Duncan, grew up in California, Montana and British Columbia. She is a prize-winning journalist and author of novels, reportage, and short stories. Her debut novel, “Gutenberg’s Apprentice,” the story of the making of the Gutenberg Bible, was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and long listed for the International Dublin Literary Prize. Her story “Everychild” won a Pushcart Prize and the 2021 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in fiction from The Missouri Review. As a longtime foreign correspondent based in England, France, and Germany, she has written numerous articles and stories set in other places and times, including “The Dacha,” a finalist for the 2016 Sunday Times (UK) Short Story Award. A letterpress printer and open water swimmer, she currently lives in Berlin, Germany, where she covers culture for The Economist.

G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com).

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Rivkah Milman is just one of the thousands of young women who fled their homes in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, looking for better prospects in New York—where the streets, people said, would be paved with gold. In Rivkah’s case, she is sixteen and pregnant, sailing to join her husband, who doesn’t even bother to meet her at the docks.

Rivkah struggles, raising her daughter in a tenement and keeping that shoddy roof over their heads through endless hours of sewing piecework for a sweatshop. But tough as Rivkah’s life is, this is really the story of her daughter, Miriam, who through a colossal but familiar misjudgment falls under the spell of Frederick Winthrop, a rich and immoral playboy who seeks out underage girls. But with help from a family friend, Mimi succeeds in separating herself from her difficult childhood in pursuit of a better life.

Miriam, who adopts the name Mimi to signal her break with the past, has always longed to become not just a seamstress but an haute couture designer. And with skill and determination, she makes progress. But the closer she comes to achieving her goals, the more contact she has with the wealthy Winthrop family. Alice Sherman Simpson keeps us on the edge of our seats as we wait to find out how these competing priorities will work themselves out.

Alice Sherman Simpson is the author of Ballroom. The Winthrop Agreement (Harper Paperbacks, 2023) is her second novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, The Merchant’s Tale, co-written with P.K. Adams, appeared in November 2023.

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